Sanjeev Bikhchandani: The founder who stepped aside before it was fashionable

In June 2010, Sanjeev Bikhchandani sent a short, polite email to a little-known food website called Foodiebay. “Deepinder, I have been using Foodiebay for a while, and I find the site extremely useful. Well done. I would like to connect anytime convenient.”

The message went unanswered for two days. The recipient, a young consultant named Deepinder Goyal, assumed it was spam from a Naukri.com salesperson. Only later did he realise it was from the father of Indian startups, Bikchandani recalled in an interview with Forbes.

When the Eternal CEO Deepinder Goyal shared his resignation from the position on X, the country went crazy. In his letter to shareholders, “While I believe I personally have the bandwidth to continue what I am doing at Eternal, and also explore new ideas outside of it, the expectations, legal and otherwise, of a public company CEO in India demand singular focus,” Goyal explained.

Hours later, Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal rushed to Goyal’s rescue and said, “This is not failure, this is maturity,” Mittal wrote, pushing back against the narrative that a founder stepping aside is inherently negative. “For years, Indian founders believed CEO = Founder = CEO. That idea is outdated.”

Sometimes, it goes beyond the fame, the power that comes with it, the Excel sheets with buried heads and starting afresh that drives innovation. While Goyal’s resignation was welcomed with a sheer sense of a warrior by the internet, he isn’t the first to do this. In fact, he is following the footsteps of someone who did it precisely 16 years ago.

A middle-class start

Bikhchandani was not born into wealth or tech. He grew up in New Delhi in a government housing colony, the son of a doctor and a homemaker. He went to St. Columba’s School, then studied economics at St. Stephen’s College before earning an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad in 1989.

His early career was resolutely corporate. He worked in advertising at Lintas and then moved to Hindustan Milkfood Manufacturers, now part of GlaxoSmithKline, where he worked on the Horlicks brand. It was a comfortable, respectable life, and then he chose to abandon a high-paying job in 1990.

For several years after quitting, there was no startup glory. He ran small, unglamorous ventures: salary surveys, feasibility reports, market studies. He worked out of a servant quarter above a garage in his father’s house. On weekends, he taught at management schools, earning Rs 2,000–2,500 a month. Of that, Rs 800 went to his father as rent. His wife, Suruchi, kept the household afloat. “I had no big idea and no vision,” he told Forbes. “I was extremely keen to be an entrepreneur.” He tried one idea after another. By his own count, Naukri.com was his 21st “small thing.”

The insight that became Naukri

While working at Horlicks, Sanjeev Bikhchandani noticed well-paid MBAs spending lunch breaks scanning job ads in Business India. Two insights stuck: jobs were a perennial obsession, and newspaper listings captured only a fraction of real hiring demand.

The idea crystallised in October 1996 after a visit to an IT expo at Pragati Maidan, where he encountered the World Wide Web for the first time. Naukri.com was launched in 1997 with Rs 2,000, at a time when India had barely 14,000 internet connections and servers had to be rented overseas.

“We bootstrapped Naukri for three years and then raised venture capital. This business of ‘I need external funding as a prerequisite to be an entrepreneur’ is wrong,” Bikhchandani said in an interview.

In its early years, staff manually retyped job ads from newspapers and magazines. Traffic grew slowly, then recruiters began calling. Naukri chose to charge employers, not jobseekers, pricing listings far below rivals, helping it survive the dot-com crash. A timely Rs 7.3-crore investment from ICICI Venture proved crucial.

“For roughly six or seven years, I could not take a salary. It was sporadic, and it was not a lot when it came,” he said. “I would teach on weekends at business schools just to survive.”

While competitors folded, Naukri broke even, hired released talent, and focused on sales and product. The 2003 launch of Resdex, its paid résumé database, became the core revenue engine.

Why he quit as CEO

Four years after the IPO, Bikhchandani did something that startled the ecosystem. On July 26, 2010, he stepped down as CEO and became Executive Vice Chairman. Hitesh Oberoi, a long-serving insider, was promoted to managing director and CEO.

Bikhchandani believed his strengths were no longer in running an operationally mature classifieds business. He wanted to look outward, at acquisitions, at early-stage bets, at the long-term architecture of the group. He believed Oberoi was better suited to run a mature classifieds business.

From operator to Ecosystem Builder

What followed was the second act of his career. Within months of stepping aside, Bikhchandani transformed Info Edge into an investment engine. Info Edge backed Zomato, Policybazaar, DotPe, Gramophone, Shipsy, Bijnis and others. It later institutionalised this activity through venture funds like Info Edge Venture Fund and Capital 2B.

Between 2010 and 2013, Info Edge put roughly Rs 86 crore into Zomato. When Zomato was listed in 2021, that stake was worth billions. The company did the same with Policybazaar, DotPe, Gramophone, Shipsy and Bijnis.

“In India, it takes 12 to 15 years for a company to really become big,” Bikhchandani later said in an interview. “Typical venture funds get nervous by year seven or eight,” he added.

But Bikhchandani never framed himself as a venture capitalist chasing exits. Over the years, Bikchandani warned founders not to build businesses around investor money alone. “Focus on the customer’s money, not the investor’s money. Investor money is easy to mistake for success. It’s not success at running a viable business,” Bikchandani said in an interview.

In 2019, he institutionalised this approach by launching Info Edge Venture Fund and later additional AIFs like Capital 2B, formalising what had until then been a balance-sheet-driven strategy.

Ashoka University and the liberal arts turn

In 2014, Bikhchandani co-founded Ashoka University with Ashish Dhawan and Pramath Raj Sinha. Conceived as “Project Nobel,” it aimed to build a world-class liberal arts university in India, funded by a collective of more than 100 donors.

He serves as a trustee and visiting faculty member and also sits on the boards of nonprofits like Chintan, which works with waste pickers in Delhi, and The 1947 Partition Archive, which preserves oral histories of Partition survivors.

He rarely talks about his wealth. When he debuted on Forbes’s billionaires list in 2019, he said the attention embarrassed him. “There is always a doubt…Do I deserve it?” he told Forbes.

As of today

Today, Bikhchandani remains Founder and Executive Vice Chairman of Info Edge. He sits on the National Startup Advisory Council, advises the government on ecosystem policy, and serves on boards at institutions like CIIE at IIM Ahmedabad.

In 2019, he made his debut in Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list with a net worth fo $1 billion. As of the latest, his net worth is pegged at $3.43 billion as per Forbes in October 2025.

Now, when you look at Deepinder Goyal’s resignation and get shocked, you know someone who invented this route 16 years ago.

Disclaimer: This is an independent profile. Sanjeev Bikhchandani and their representatives were contacted but did not respond prior to the time of publication. In the absence of direct comment, this article was reported using publicly available records and regulatory filings, where applicable. This content is not sponsored and was produced in accordance with FinancialExpress.com’s editorial guidelines.